Teasing Master Takagi-san 😝 ・ Volume 1, chapter 1

I would say that you basically got it, yep. :grin:

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Even after you start reading, you will need to need to look up grammar points and contractions. If you will be looking them up anyway, you might as well be reading, too!

I started reading in…2018? Well, I was just deciphering back then. Since then I’ve read over 160 manga volumes, and I still need to look up grammar occasionally. (And I still look up vocabulary every single day!)

Here is an example from another manga.

The off-panel speaker is asking, 「(なに)をしているのよ?」

However, three things are happening:

  1. The を is dropped.
  2. The い in 〜ている is dropped.
  3. The るの became んの.

It might take a while, but you will get used to it because it happens all the time!

In fact, you will see this exact example in the first volume of Takagi four times, including right at the beginning.

Correct, that’s what that is, and it will be vertical in vertical text (while the number one remains horizontal).

Here is an example.

The line is, 「小学一年生かー…」

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You pretty much have it right. The concept of saying someone’s name with contempt doesn’t always clearly translate into English, but things like “Darn you, Takagi!” are close enough.

I don’t have an explanation, but it comes up a lot in some series!

For example...

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...and also...

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(It’s in the aside text to the left.)

...and these over here...

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...and in an internal monologue.

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I haven’t seen one.

For my first manga I read, I was going it alone, and it was really slow.

I think if you have the will and motivation to get through a manga volume without a book club, it’s worth giving it a try.

But I also think it’s good to pick something from a book club if it’s your first or second manga because it really helps to be able to ask questions and get answers from more experienced learners. When you know more grammar, it’s a lot easier to tackle a manga on your own.

If I remember right, it has spoilers for the very first page :wink:

I never took notice of which usage comes up more, so I cannot comment on that.

You will discover there is even more nuance that you get used to over time.

Here's an example.

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In this case, the two inadvertently looked at one another. “Our eyes meet,” or “Our eyes happened to meet.”

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I wonder if it’s the glottal stop at the end of a sentence indicating excitement (whether that is positive or negative excitement), and it’s doubled-up to indicate extra excitement the way we use multiple exclamation points in English? Totally spitballing that though.

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That’s the sense/feel I get for it as well.

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These are wise words, every second that I’m not reading - not a waist of time - but almost. Tonight is the night. But I warn that I’ll probably be bombing this thread with questions :wink:

How has your japanese learning journey been like? I like to hear stories of people who did it. After how long have you felt like you could confidently read without the vocabulary being an obsession? And did you read every day since then? Details appreciated :ok_hand:

Woah, I don’t have the whole context but I guess in this example it would be hard to get the nuance… I hope I’m going to get used to it soon. What I’m afraid of aren’t the things that I don’t understand because I just can check them up. It’s the things I think I got, but not really :joy: I hope I don’t get along with wrong nuances too often :crossed_fingers:

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It’s going to happen sometimes. You might read something and misunderstand the nuance. Then later you see the grammar again and misunderstand the nuance. Then later you see the grammar, and you think, “This nuance doesn’t make any sense.”

That sounds bad, right?

Actually, it’s not too bad.

Sure, it’s unfortunate you didn’t properly understand some earlier scenes.

But at this point, when you read up about the grammar again, it will be a lot easier to understand. Even if you had previously read about the grammar from the same source already and kind of understood it, it becomes really easy to understand if you read it later after seeing the grammar a lot in native material.

Although I've written about it a bit here and there on the forums, I don't recall if I've done a comprehensive write-up. So, I'll give a few of the highlights here.

I took high school Japanese back in the Stone Age (long long ago).

I learned to read カタカナ and ひらがな, and maybe upwards of 100 simple kanji.

Over the years, I watched a lot of anime in Japanese with English subtitles.

I tried a few times to read manga in Japanese, but I always failed on the first few pages.

I read grammar material, but it was often dry and didn’t stick.

I went through SRS for the 2,000 most common Japanese vocabulary words, but because I didn’t know much kanji, I forgot most of them. (And a lot of time was wasted on reviewing the same cards over and over often because I used a system that didn’t suspend leeches, cards I just wasn’t learning.) That took me about three or so years. Mostly a waste.

One day, I watched an anime that was an adaptation of a manga. The manga was only available in Japanese. I told myself, “I’m going to read this. This time, I will be successful.”

There is a concept: “Wanting to do something versus deciding to do something.”

Before, I had simply wanted to read manga in Japanese. And that is why I failed every time.

Now I decided to read manga in Japanese. And that is why I succeeded.

The manga didn’t have furigana (and I wasn’t using WaniKani at the time). I bought a digital copy and used a tool to convert the kanji image on the page to text that I could search online. And if the tool failed, I used a website to select the radicals from a list, and it would show all kanji that use those radicals. Then I would look for the one that matched.

Tools for this sort of thing have come a very long way since 2018!

Aside from looking up kanji, I was looking up each vocabulary word and putting them and their source sentence into Anki to do reviews on. (That is, the first time a word came up.) In retrospect, this was a bad idea, because a lot of infrequent words became leeches and I had suspending leeches disabled. That means a lot of infrequent words kept coming up often to review because I wasn’t able to learn them.

Besides looking up the kanji and vocabulary, the most important thing is that I was looking up all the unknown grammar that encountered.

It turns out, looking up the exact grammar I’m seeing in a manga made is a lot easier for me to learn it.

I spend several months to get through the volume.

After I finished it, I started using WaniKani.

I found the book clubs, and stared joining in with the Absolute Beginner Book Club. And later the Beginner Book Club.

I’ve also watched a lot of Cure Dolly’s subtitled Japanese from Scratch video series on YouTube, which made a lot of things make more sense for me.

In the book clubs, I started answering people’s questions. Oftentimes, I had to look up the grammar and read about it to ensure I was answering their question correctly. This improved my understanding of the grammar. If someone answered the question before me because I took too long to look it up and write it, I could discard my draft without posting it. I still gained by reading more about the grammar and writing up about it, so it was still worth it!

Once I felt I could easily keep up with the Absolute Beginner Book Club (and I was barely about to keep up with the Beginner Book Club), I started reading some of my own manga picks.

One manga I picked to read is a series I had seen the subtitled anime a few times, and I had read the manga in English one or two times. This meant I already knew everything that was going on. I did not need to decipher the context because I knew it all. It was like a superpower! I could focus on the vocabulary words and grammar more. I think I benefited a lot from that experience.

I came to use three reading methods, which I wrote about more in my study log at the top of this post here:

  1. The “Understand Everything” Method: I look up every unknown word and grammar. This is how I recommend people read their first manga. It’s easy to lose motivation, so recommend setting up a schedule to decipher X number of pages every day at a set time. For my first manga I read a volume of, I read four panels after work every day.

  2. The “Keep Reading” Method: I focus on reading without stopping. I only look up grammar or words if I have no idea what’s going on.

  3. The “Compare with English Translation” Method: Read in Japanese, but look at an official English release when I get stuck. I found this method was actually the worst for me because if I had the check the English, I wasn’t going back and trying to understand how the Japanese had that meaning.

I’ve tried different methods, such as reading a certain number of pages per day (when I wasn’t as good at it), reading a whole chapter per day (when I was building up my reading stamina), etc.

The most important thing is to set a time each day when you will start reading. Then read what you can. Even if you don’t have the motivation to read, you have to have a schedule for reading.

I wrote a bit about motivation in another thread:

Makes it a schedule to read every day.

Even if you don’t feel like reading, you still need to read.

Even if you’re too tired for it, you need to read.

Even if you think you won’t be able to think clearly, you need to read.

But! It’s okay even if you read only one sentence.

If you read only one sentence, and you think “I really can’t read today,” then you have achieved victory for the day. You did some reading.

You may even find something funny happens. You might not feel like reading, but when you read one sentence you might find you can read a second sentence. Then you might find you want to read the third sentence. Before you know it, you might even read a whole page. And before that, you were thinking you didn’t want to read anything that day.

Phew, I think that’s enough for one day!

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Regarding this particular passage, do you have advices for someone who is going thru vocabs and kanjis with SRS? (WK and Genki plus other random vocabs I found)

I was able to succesfull begin learning Japanese for this same reason, I tried studying other languages in the past but never went over the 2-3 weeks of study. This time, lookinng back to my failures I told to myself - Mario, this is serious, you’re going to learn Jap. Not just study it, but learn :point_up_2: don’t know what the future holds for me, but atm I’m at a point that I didn’t imagine being able to reach :crossed_fingers:

Wow, hearing this I feel so blessed today having tools such as google translator. It’s enough to activate the image recognization and it will make me select any text in the page to copy and paste it into a dictionary, and this saves a lot of time

Indeed, I don’t think google translate and iPhones had such text recognization functions back then

Same same! I think she has done a brilliant work

I believe that answering people’s question (or just writing about it) is the best because it’s a chance to elaborate what you learnt and put it in order

I hear about this often, and I’m wondering - why should I prefer this over n.1 method?
I have lot of patience and what I like is not just reading and understanding but studying too, so I was thinking to just go for the first method you mentioned till I don’t just need it anymore, what do you think?

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience. I’m aiming toward your same direction and I hope I’ll eventually make it to your level. Meanwhile I’ll accept the advices you gave me here!

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On the っっ

It seems to be that our hunches were correct, @ChristopherFritz. I asked about it with my tutor to confirm, and this is what she had to say:

はいっっ!
これは意味がありません :joy:
強調しているだけです!

普通は付けるなら一つだけど、
もっと勢いを表したい時に二つつけても大丈夫です!

えっっっ?えーっ?えっ?
なんでもアレンジできます :sweat_smile:

@polv, tagging you as well since you expressed interest in it.

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Here is my personal advice. It might not work for everyone.

1) If you know fewer than 1,000, it doesn’t hurt to use a frequency list targeted to the genre you are reading. (For example, it’s easy to find a frequency list build from a lot of slice-of-life anime series.)

2) Using a frequency list helps you avoid spending time on uncommon words in SRS.

For example, for Takagi the word 恥ずかしい appears a lot. It’s a good word to know, and you should learn it. But the word 乗り切る only comes up one time. (In fact, across most of the manga I’ve read, it’s only come up two times total!) It’s not worth learning in the beginning. Just look it up so you understand what you are reading, and then move on.

I don’t know the best way for most people to utilize frequency lists. At least for Takagi, my list is available, so definitely use that to see if a word is frequent or not in the series!

3) Since you are using WaniKani, don’t worry about learning kanji from another SRS system.

If you want to learn ()ずかしい, and add it to Anki, it’s fine to put furigana on it. It’s fine to learn it as はずかしい. Trying to learn the kanji at the same time might make it too difficult. (But if you can easily learn the kanji when learning a new word, go for it!)

If you learn はずかしい before you reach WaniKani level 35, then 恥 will be easier to learn when it comes up in your WaniKani lessons.

A lot of the words you see in Genki are probably high frequency words.

I remember using a paperback kanji book to look up kanji by radical. This was before fancy technology like smartphones even existed, and the concept of OCR (image recognition for text) for Japanese wasn’t really a thing. And (legal) digital manga didn’t exist, as e-books weren’t really a thing yet.

The simple answer is: you shouldn’t (yet!)

When you learn more grammar and more vocabulary, it will become easier to accept (and embrace) ambiguity in what you are reading.

This is where you don’t know all the words, but you feel you have a sense of what is going on, so you keep reading without looking up the unknown words.

If you don’t know enough grammar and vocabulary, you won’t be able to do this yet. If you keep working on deciphering text and learning grammar and learning vocabulary, you will know when you can try this method.

This is the way =D

Side-note: Even if I sound like I’m saying “do it this way, not that way”, this is all opinion based on my own experience. It can help you get started, but later you might find things work differently for you than they did/do for me. The important thing is that you have a good foundation to get started without overthinking it, then slowly develop an improved method over time.

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っっっ

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Ok guys, it’s done, I’m reading it. I’m studying every millimeter of every page, and I’m also enjoying it!

I was wondering something, it could ve stupid but I can’t take my mind off of it:
I’m seeing onomatopoeias that I don’t really get and the mere dictionary isn’t able to give me the nuances. For example, I see different kinds of laughs such as ふふ and different taps such as ゴンゴン and I’d like to know what these differ in nuances from others, but I don’t know where to look and googling didn’t work. Does anyone of you know some source to check this up? Otherwise I’ll made a list and ask you guys on here :grin:

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If it’s sound effects, it might help to look them up here:

If it’s words used in dialogue, someone might have a good answer, but for me, I look them up and move on. Over time I’ll see them a lot and I get to know them better.

That said, it never hurts to ask here. (Just don’t forget to include a page number!)

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Great, in this case I guess that the best would be to SRS exactly that manga most frequent vocabs list - as I’m doing after your suggestion.

Already doing it :grin:

I was about to ask this haha! I tried to SRS the kanji too but it’s difficult to remember… will go with readings only then

I will, and the site you linked me looks exactly what I was looking for!

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First question:

別に I know what it means and I know what 別 alone means but can’t metabolize it. Why the に particle? Can someone explain the structure?

Chapter 1 Page 2
(Yes I’m still here :joy:)

Edit: I see that 別 here means ‘special’ or more literally ‘separate’ and paired with a negative sentence it means ‘nothing special’ (I suppose the negative is intended because the whole sentence here is 別に… 何も…) but I’m trying to get the role of に

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One thing with に, is that it can also be used to turn nouns and な adjectives into adverbs, and that’s what’s happening here. 別に is actually short for 別に~ない, but I think it says a lot that I’ve pretty much only seen 別に on its own, rather than the full construct. I’m not saying you won’t run into it, but it’s far more common to just see 別に as a one-off statement, with anything else implied.

The best way to picture the role of に in these instances is to look at as adding “-ly” to a word in English.

Separate is a noun, but becomes an adverb when written as separately, for example.

Edit: Side-note, but you’ll also see that some words become an adverb with と (especially the case with 擬音語 (onomatopoeia) words)!

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Awesome explanation! It’s just like saying

“Specially… […I’m not doing anything]” (don’t know if the english is correct but I got what you mean)

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It's surprising just how much you see if when you look for it with ない.

(From a different manga:)
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That said, I agree that it comes up a lot on its own!

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I knew this use, the と comes pretty intuitive to me and every time I see it in a sentence I can feel what’s doing there (kinda), but the に particle in its many uses is still a bit foggy.

I was thinking about how could that sentence continue if the negation was explicit
Could we say something like:

何してんの?
別にことがない? as “nothing special”
I don’t know if this is grammatical

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I think what you have posted is grammatical and works fine (you’d be understood), but I think I would have filled it in as a direct negation to the question asked, if I were to add anything at all (though, I would just use 別に like Nishikata, honestly):

別に何もしていない

Edit: Also, after checking that page of the manga, he follows up with 何も, so I feel even more confident in that. :stuck_out_tongue:

To elaborate a bit, I think the ことがない would feel a bit more “final” than intended because it’s a set phrase on its own meaning “something has never occurred”. (But that’s just a personal opinion. Somebody could totally disagree with that)

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I caught the nuance :ok_hand: everything is going slow but good :joy::star_struck: going to watch the Cure Dolly video on conditional now for the -eba sentence on page 4 :grin:
Out of curiosity, I’d like to know how long did it take to you guys to go over, separately, the first chapter and the first manga

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